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Welcome to the ad-free internet

economist.com

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Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#301

Post by kmlx »

Qwertious wrote: post #242
kmlx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock. this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it'…

YouTube is a monopoly and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription. They don't get to hide behind "it's not a public good, it's a private company". Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.

> YouTube is a monopoly

what? in which country and how?

> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription

i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.

> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.

i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#302

Post by kmlx »

vvvvvvvvvvvv wrote: post #181
kmlx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock. this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it'…

> I feel like I'm misunderstanding something... In the EU it's ok to ask companies to do things, even if it costs them money.

everywhere it's the same. the problem is that it makes no sense for a state entity to force a company offer their product via a 3rd party without taking into consideration the myriad of questions that arise.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#303

Post by dist-epoch »

lobsterthief wrote: post #298
dist-epoch wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know from insiders that some sports bookies would look up your address (that you are required by law to provide to betting sites) on Google Maps to figure out if you live in a rich people's house. If so, they would immediately pass the account to their most experienced seller.

Why Google Maps? You can just use Zillow or similar to find out exactly how much you paid for it and when.

Zillow is for US. These bookies were in Europe.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#304

Post by hightrix »

echan00 wrote: post #50

That's Reddit. It's actually not bad

Are you suggesting Reddit is ad-free? It is not, at all. Using the official app or the website that is not located at old.reddit shows a promoted post every 5 or so posts for me. Yes, you can use old.reddit and not get those ads, but then of the content, I'd estimate about 1 in 10 or so posts on r/popular are native advertising.

Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#305

Post by MandieD »

loughnane wrote: post #251
travoc wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My children are fascinated with the ads they occasionally see at their friends' homes. Due to their self-hosted media collection and prolific ad-blocking tech at home, they are rarely influenced by manipulative advertisers or inappropriate content suggestions. I consider it my duty as a good parent to keep up the fight.

My kids feel the same way. I feel like I've done something good that they see ads for what they are since they haven't "always been there" for them.

Kudos to you all; this is what I’m hoping to hold the line on with my kid. We rarely watched TV or really any sort of video entertainment before he came along, so we didn’t have to change our consumption habits.

It’ll be interesting to see how my kid reacts to the always-on TVs at my relatives over Christmas…

So far, he only gets to watch stuff I’ve downloaded or specifically looked up (no recommendations has really quieted things down) on an old laptop. He’s learned how to skip to the next video in VLC, but as I have it set to display a text list of titles, still has to ask me to put on a specific one. That’s fine; it keeps my temptation to park him in front of the screen and do something else in check.

Ironically for being the only American kid at his Kindergarten (German preschool), he has no idea who the American cartoon characters on his classmates’ backpacks and jackets are.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#306

Post by MandieD »

figassis wrote: post #107
FerretFred wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)

Like toy unboxing on Youtube Kids

Just one of the many reasons why I won’t let my kid use YouTube Kids and instead manually look up everything I’m ok with him watching on the main “Enhanced” site and watch it with him, then download the stuff he likes for use with VLC.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#307

Post by skoocda »

account42 wrote: post #268
amadeuspagel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are, with or without ads. The web is a struggle for attention. No website can survive that doesn't addict you to check it again and again.

> No website can survive that doesn't addict you to check it again and again. What is that supposed to mean? There are plenty of websites that are not out to earn any money. It doesn't take anything for them to "survive".

That's false. Every website needs a server to survive. Serving can be cheap, but it ain't free.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#308

Post by Digit-Al »

littlefish444 wrote: post #9

Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…

I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I was online was costing more and more money. The sense of freedom I felt when I got fixed cost, always on broadband, was liberating.

Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.

Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.

I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#309

Post by no_wizard »

autoexec wrote: post #287
no_wizard wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a small cottage industry of privacy focused products that do some section of the heavy lifting (adguard comes to mind, and there is a paid DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration as well) but no "one stop shop" as of yet, and I think in part its because - the market isn't conditioned to want these services - awareness of their benefits aren't obvious - Its still within th…

Ad-blocking/privacy as a service has a problem in that it's only a matter of time before your data (DNS queries for example) will be logged and sold to advertisers. Enshittification is inevitable, the cloud can't be trusted, and neither can the state, so the people who want privacy focused products will naturally want to self-host instead of creating an account that can track them before handing over all their data t…

Isn't DNS over HTTPS and other DNS encryption schemes suppose to protect against this type of tracking since you can't introspect anything in transit?

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#310

Post by octacat »

_thisdot wrote: post #270
octacat wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh, tell it to the tram schedule app, popular in Poland. You pay subscription or you watch unskipable ads. Very cool when you have 3 minutes before your trap. And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so. Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023

Much worse with Indian Railways. The website is riddled with ads. And if you need to book an emergency ticket, the portal opens 10AM for everyone in India. Obviously the traffic gets too much. I keep the network tab open and its painful to see requests for ads hogging up the resources when you're trying to book an emergency ticket in a race against the nation. Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even…

oh, polish trains site is made by drunk students for a bottle of vodka... It is just terribly bad and haven't changed to the good side since like 10 years. They added some ads though and broke login for me during this time :D If you need to ride using several changes - just don't. You need to book each ticket separately.

German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.

I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D

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